


Sanguinary

by Six_Piece_Chicken_McNobody



Category: The Dark Crystal (1982)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Movie, aka How SkekNa Got His Gnarly Hook Hand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-12 03:22:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20557394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Six_Piece_Chicken_McNobody/pseuds/Six_Piece_Chicken_McNobody
Summary: Ten life-draining, youth-stealing, soul-sucking monsters, lurking in the middle of a wasteland trine after trine.Sooner or later,somebody'sgoing to consider cannibalism.





	Sanguinary

For a group who shared nothing but raw contempt, the Skeksis seemed determined to do just about everything together. The schism from their original selves was made unanimously. Their rise to power was achieved not only through deep-wired ambition, but also a kind of symbiotic teamwork.

And when they finally fell to sin and debauchery, they fell together, and took all of Thra down with them.

But the Skeksis were an individualistic lot, and after their initial plunge, some of them fared better than others—though the very definition of “better” was their greatest source of contention. No amount of adornments or boasting or ceremonial rock-smashing ever seemed to put that debate to rest.

Still, even those who ended up with titles that fed into their basest urges—the gluttonous Gourmand, the vain Ornamentalist, the sadistic Slave-master—had a glint of virtue hidden deep in their vices. SkekEkt could be cunning, in his own way, and skekAyuk at least held his meals to some kind of standard for seasoning and presentation before he stuffed them down his gullet. Even skekNa, for all his cruelty, retained a shred of intellect.

That was what skekTek liked to believe, anyway. SkekNa didn’t make it easy when he tried to nab a snack on his way back from a village raid, and lost his hand to a mother nebrie in the process.

His howls could chip the castle’s stone walls, and skekTek left his lab just to see what all the fuss was about, led, as always, by morbid curiosity. The fortress was wretched, but it wasn’t typically a place for screams. In fact, skekTek’s lab was usually the noisiest place, thanks to the live subjects and whirring machinery.

But today, skekNa was outdoing them all. “_My hand_!” he cried, over and over until even skekEkt and skekSil shared an eyeroll at his dramatics. SkekTek couldn’t say he was particularly impressed, either. SkekNa would need to lose a leg and rewire his own circulatory system—by _himself_—before he was on the Scientist’s level.

“Take him away,” skekUng growled, shoving the Slave-master at skekTek and ignoring his shriek of pain. SkekTek frowned, wondering when exactly he had started taking orders from the Garthim General.

“And do _what_ with him?”

“_Fix_ him. The ceremony begins in two hours, and we don’t waste precious energy on _weaklings_.” SkekUng spoke the word with such vitriol that it left flecks of white spittle on his chin. “Mend him or don’t. Either way, I want him _silenced_.”

SkekNa was in too much pain to protest as skekTek led him out of the room, but he hissed over his shoulder at skekUng in a small act of defiance. SkekUng responded with a roar, and that settled that.

Once skekNa was sure they were out of earshot, he started whining again, until he sounded like one of the mewling creatures he’d lost his hand to in the first place. The wordless, animalistic sounds, peppered with occasional bouts of cursing under his breath, made him almost pleasant company, as Skeksis went.

The closer they got to the lab, however, the more on-edge he became. His muttering grew tense and harder to make out, and he slowed down every few steps, until skekTek finally snapped at him to keep up.

Out of all the Skeksis, skekTek frequently got along with skekNa the best, especially when he had a batch of freshly-drained podlings to offer. SkekNa was always delighted to add them to the chain, and they followed him like the others: dazed, milky-eyed, and brainlessly obedient, like children who were just woken up from a nap.

But despite their unusually high level of camaraderie, it always took a lot of work to get skekNa to visit skekTek’s lab. Every Skeksis was defined by his selfishness and cruelty, but few could match skekNa in sheer depravity. The science-lab-slash-torture-chamber should have been his favorite haunt, yet he avoided it like the plague.

_Which he might very well have_, skekTek mused as he entered his haven and rattled a few crowded cages, just to enjoy the reactions of their occupants. At a glance, skekNa was riddled with atrophy, abscessed teeth, and sarcoptic mange, and likely a host of other maladies which skekTek hadn’t had a chance to diagnose, let alone treat.

It was almost comical, the way skekNa crept through the room. It didn’t matter how many gadgets, instruments, or gauges were involved. It didn’t matter how long it had taken skekTek to measure the exact angle needed for the Crystal to refract the triple dose of sunlight upon them all. How he had designed the mechanism to raise and lower the Crystal like clockwork, without sustaining further damage. How he alone had discovered the secret of draining life essence from the little woodland rats that scurried around their empire.

As far as skekNa was concerned, what skekTek did down here in his lab was akin to the occult. He didn’t trust it, even when he reaped its rewards in the form of podling drones and prolonged life.

It was an insult to skekTek’s field, his ambition, and his prowess. But he was tired today, yearning for that restoration ceremony more than ever, so he simply waved skekNa over to an earthenware basin, stolen from a podling village and miraculously ferried back to the castle intact by Garthim.

SkekNa held his arm gingerly, refusing to step forward. SkekTek waved more impatiently. “It must be washed. Come.”

“I washed it already.”

SkekTek blinked. “When?” he asked, recalling the unholy fit skekNa had been throwing when he returned to the castle and wondering when he would’ve had the presence of mind to care for his wound.

“It was the first thing I did. I escaped the nebrie, and then I washed with water.”

“…with _swamp water_?” skekTek asked incredulously, though after nine hundred and some odd trine, he didn’t know why he was so surprised. He was talking to a Skeksis who, upon losing his eye, had simply torn the dragging hem off his robe and knotted it crudely around his head to cover the hole. SkekTek would have admired his pragmatism if the wound hadn’t started to close over the loose threads, resulting in a matted mess and a vicious infection which had been the Scientist’s responsibility to fix.

Of _course_ skekNa had “cleaned” his bloody stump of a hand with swamp water.

“It needs to be washed,” skekTek repeated, because repetition was the only way to handle a patient as stubborn as skekNa. The Slave-master had always been short-sighted, even before losing his eye, absolutely resistant to change because it ran too close to the risk of growth. The restoration ceremonies were routine maintenance for him, the marriage of painstaking calculations and cosmic phenomena boiling down to nothing more than a way to uphold the status quo.

And what had it earned him? A mucid eye socket that still wept to this day, all because he couldn’t be bothered to hobble down to the lab for proper treatment. In spite of his occasional shrewdness and sharpness of mind, he was, in many ways, self-sabotagingly stupid.

Still, this new injury seemed to have humbled him somewhat. He allowed skekTek to undress the wound, which, as _usual_, had already started sticking to the ratty fibers in which it had been bound. SkekNa seemed less bothered by the pain than by the sight. He glared at his mangled wrist as though he were trying to force his entire hand to regenerate on the spot. As though they weren’t all so decrepit and poor of health that it took a feat of magic and engineering every single day just to stay alive.

SkekTek made quick work of the cleaning, more for his own sake than his patient’s. When the worst of the gore had been washed away, he sprinkled a little powder on the area—dehydrated storax venom, able to induce paralysis in its liquid state, but moderately harmless in dried form. It would promote clotting in a body that could no longer be counted on to heal itself, and with any luck, it would numb the nerves a little. SkekTek sprinkled a second dose on skekNa’s wrist and watched his skin literally crawl. He would’ve loved to know what sorts of bacteria the Slave-master had picked up from the swamp and added to his collection, a swarm of parasites teeming in his blood vessels the way the Skeksis themselves scuttled through the castle halls.

But he left that curiosity for another day—assuming skekNa would ever return to the lab after what was about to happen. “Come,” skekTek said, leading him to a flat table. It was designed for creatures much smaller than Skeksis, but skekTek knew how to adapt better than most of his kind. It would do the job.

SkekNa eyed it warily. “Why?” he asked, starting to wonder why his arm hadn’t been rebandaged yet. SkekTek didn’t answer at first, rummaging in a pile of old equipment that he’d meant to sort through ages ago, but just hadn’t had the time. His comrades seemed to regard his lab as a basement in which to dump all unwanted things. “I’m sure you’ll find some use for this,” they’d say with unhidden amusement as they dropped off armfuls of trash, mite-infested clothing, or leftover bones with the marrow already sucked dry.

The joke was on them. It might have taken him a long time, and plenty of trial and error, but skekTek could find a use for anything.

“We need to…outfit you…with…” SkekTek grunted, struggling to unearth something from the heap while skekNa watched. Even if he’d still had both his hands, it would never have occurred to him to help.

Finally, skekTek said, “Here,” and carried an old Garthim claw to the table. SkekNa stared, uncomprehending.

“What’s it for?”

“For you.” SkekTek tested it to make sure it still performed at least a rudimentary grabbing gesture. “You need a replacement.”

SkekNa spat on the floor. “I don’t want that. Give me one like yours.”

“There aren’t any others like mine,” skekTek said, taking perverse but not undeserved pride in his work. He’d spent many trine designing and constructing his prosthetic with his own two hands, and then willingly amputated one to make room for it. It was one of his most intricate inventions, and it was all his.

Besides, it wasn’t like skekNa’s work required much dexterity. As long as he still had one hand left for chain-pulling and whip-cracking, he should be satisfied.

SkekNa refused to budge. “That’s trash,” he said. “It came from a Garthim.”

“It was…_harvested_,” skekTek insisted, only fairly certain he was using the right word. It had been so long since anything had grown in these lands.

“It was _scavenged_,” skekNa shot back. SkekTek laid the claw down and grabbed skekNa’s arm with both hands, bio and mechanical alike. SkekNa yelped and snapped his jaws, and skekTek snapped right back. While they distracted themselves with displays of aggression, skekTek managed to wrestle skekNa’s arm down until it was stretched out flat on the table. He had to bend skekNa forward to keep his arm in place, and the new position didn’t exactly do wonders for his patient’s temperament. He struggled to stand upright again, instinctively craving a less submissive posture, his tail thrashing and ripping loose threads from the hem of his robes.

“Be still,” skekTek barked, bringing skekNa’s arm toward a manacle that was welded to the edge of the tabletop. When he guided the arm into place, skekNa shrieked and pulled it back—not enough to get away, just enough to make the whole ordeal more difficult for both of them. He left a sickening red smear on the table as he cried out angrily, “It _hurts_!”

“_It hurts_,” skekTek mocked, forcing the arm forward again and clamping the manacle down on his wrist. The warden was proving himself to be even worse than the prisoners when he was put in their place. SkekNa might have shared skekUng’s cruel streak, but he certainly didn’t share the General’s pain tolerance.

In an almost compassionate gesture, skekTek found an old, wooden dowel on his work bench and offered it to skekNa. The Slave-master took it in his jaws, already steeling himself against the pain, but nowhere near enough. He recoiled when skekTek picked up the Garthim claw and lined its stem up with the wound, and when the Scientist started to push it in, skekNa lost what little composure he had. He tore his arm free, undoing the meager progress of the storax venom and painting a broad stripe across skekTek’s examining table. He bit down so hard that he broke the dowel in half, cracking a tooth and filling his mouth with splinters.

In the chaos, skekTek lost his hold on the metal claw, and it hit the floor, bending at the joint. He snarled and grabbed skekNa again, much less clinically than before. Whether he was trying to force him back into the manacle to complete the procedure, or simply obeying some primitive urge to lash out at whatever defied him, skekTek couldn’t say. He may have had greater impulse control than his brethren, but for a Skeksis, that was a low bar.

Nothing could assuage skekNa’s fight-or-flight response once it kicked in. He howled curses at the Scientist, who wasted no time on words as he tried to subdue what was easily his most troublesome patient. SkekTek bared his teeth and whipped his tail, upending a small table and sending an array of brightly-colored bottles rolling across the floor. SkekNa tried to bite him, and then, in desperate panic, he tried to strike skekTek with a hand that no longer existed.

Red-brown blood sprayed in an arc from his open wrist. It splashed on the wall, sullied skekTek’s machinery, and landed on some caged specimens, who had been watching the fight with almost insane hope, anxious for two of the monsters to finally destroy each other.

And a few errant drops, farther-reaching than the rest, landed in the ceremonial basin at the edge of the room.

SkekTek hated that bowl. His lab was a place of trial and function, not a place to indulge in gilded excess. But skekSo insisted on draining life essence directly into the basin lately, to avoid losing a single drop, and on the days when his strength hadn’t ebbed too much, he made the trek down to the lab and drank from the decorative bowl. The others had mocked him for his sense of needless ceremony, at least until it was their turn to partake. Suddenly, it was of the greatest importance that _all_ of them be given the honor of drinking from the same vessel as their Emperor.

Even skekNa—utilitarian to a fault—had insisted on having his drink from the gold basin. Conformity was one of the safest ways to navigate life in the Skeksis castle, after all. Though he didn’t relish it the way the others did—if it were up to him, he would have been satisfied taking his draft in a simple wooden cup.

Now, however, skekNa’s gaze was fixed on the basin, glued to it like one of the many jewels that adorned its sides. SkekTek stared as well, the two of them frozen like a pair of animals, distracted from their fight by something even more worthy of their attention.

The basin was full of Gelfling lifeblood—the last dose they would ever have. SkekTek had been hoarding it, squeezing every drop he could from the captives. He’d kept a few imprisoned after draining them, just to see if their life forces would replenish enough to manage a second round. But the others were uneasy with keeping Gelflings in the fortress, even catatonic ones.

“Not worth the risk,” skekSil had said, and skekUng—in a moment rarer and more unpredictable than anything in the history of Thra—agreed.

“You’ve done your work,” he said to the Scientist. “My Garthim will do the rest.”

And after all of that precious work, amassing an elixir that could undo decades—even centuries—of decay, one careless fight had contaminated the entire batch.

The smell of the concoction leeched into the air: spilled blood and extracted essence, death and life, like two cords wound together until their fibers fused and they could never be pulled apart. Trapped in the dank, windowless lab, warmed by the heat rising up from the Crystal pit, it smelled fermented. SkekTek’s heart pounded, his blood visibly rushing through the tubes attached to his robes. SkekNa forgot his pain as he gaped at the bowl, a string of saliva hanging from his crooked beak.

Skeksis blood hadn’t contaminated the supply. It had enriched it. After all, if Gelfling life was so powerful, then what could be stronger than that which was capable of its destruction?

SkekTek’s first thought was a result of trained obedience to the hierarchy, from the days when their Emperor wielded twin swords and led the slaughter through the Gelfling kingdoms. SkekSo would have been ecstatic to receive a stronger dose of lifeblood, and he might even reward skekTek by elevating him above his peers, at least for a while.

The Scientist’s second thought was that skekSo was dying, and dying quickly. He lay in bed for days at a time now, trying to convince himself and his subjects that he was convalescing instead of actively decomposing. Who was he to stop skekTek—who had done the work of gathering Gelfling essence, who had discovered the secrets of draining it in the first place—from drinking it himself? The old fool could barely even walk anymore.

And skekTek’s third realization—the final one in a Great Conjunction of epiphanies—was that it had only taken a drizzle of Skeksis blood to fill his lab with that maddening scent. SkekNa was cradling his arm, but it continued to leak like a bad quill. He was cruel, but cowardly. A vicious fighter, but easily subdued. And wounded.

Without a word spoken between them, skekNa bristled. He stared at the Scientist with open suspicion, and the Scientist stared back. His eyes were horribly mismatched: one dark and fluid, the other bright and cybernetic. There was more hunger and distrust in the air than ever before as both of them fixated on one horrible, illicit, “_what if_?”

When skekTek finally moved, skekNa drew back, baring his teeth in a display that was as fearsome as it was fearful. But skekTek very deliberately ignored him as he crossed the room. Without giving himself a chance to think about what he was doing, he grabbed the underside of the basin with both hands and heaved.

The contents sloshed onto the floor and followed its shallow incline to the Crystal pit. SkekNa jolted and took a step forward, as if he were about to try to scoop it back up with his single hand, salvaging even just one mouthful. But it was already too late—the mess spilled over the edge and into the molten pool below, with a sharp sound like steam escaping from a tea kettle. All that remained was a shimmering stain on the floor, and a few vacant podlings emerged from the shadows to mop it up with rags, squeezing the last of the Gelfling essence into a small, moldy bucket.

SkekNa stared as the Scientist turned around, grimly satisfied with his decision. Disposing of such a precious commodity was an even greater taboo than what he’d been mulling over moments ago. Still, it needed to be done. It wasn’t an act of mercy, or compassion, or even pity. It was an act of self-preservation. Once skekNa overcame his shock, he understood this. And when skekTek returned to the table, he followed, and endured the procedure with only mild resistance and occasional protests.

They’d had a moment of mutual awareness—about as close as two Skeksis could get to genuine friendship. They each had their share of personality defects, but among their peers, they seemed to hold the fewest illusions about themselves. They were small. They commanded no armies except mindless, sluggish drones. They were brittle, anemic, and wasting.

And in Skeksis culture, setting a precedent like fratricide or cannibalism was only taboo if you were too weak to enforce it.

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this before I watched AoR, and I was like, "hmm, this is kind of dark."  
I feel like a doofus now. Cannibalism is probably one of the most reasonable and sane thoughts that's ever scuttled its way through skekTek's brain.  
(Also, I don't know if any of the expanded TDC stories explain how skekNa lost his hand or his eye, so I'm just gonna go ahead and say it's because he was being a greedy little moron.)


End file.
